I just watched Barbie and The Diamond Castle again and hear me tf out. If Liana and Alexa are so financially crippled that they CAN'T AFFORD FOOD. Why are they growing flowers??? Clearly they have some serious gardening experience. Plant some potatoes! Barbie has like 17 PhDs, she can grow some potatoes, right? Why are y'all starving for?
I know this is technically a movie within a movie and Barbie is supposed to be an actress playing Liana, but even then! I'd like to speak to the plastic director who made these creative choices, some awful plot holes going on here, mate, the entire movie could have been avoided with potatoes. Liana and Alexa wouldn't have had to rush to town to sell their flowers because they would have food stocked, they never would have found the mirror and they could live their happy little cottagecore, lesbian- *COUGH COUGH COUGH* SORRY- "roommates" life forever. The End!
Granted, Melody would go on to live her life in entrapment for the foreseeable future, but I'm just bewildered as to why Alexa and Liana would choose to run an unsuccessful flower business and starve when they could just grow food.
Some people have been saying this, but I don't think it's been said enough and I'm just going to add my voice to the mix.
Nimona's nomination is being framed as an example of "Look at what Disney missed out on!" and I get it. It's a nice, tasty schadenfreude situation and we all like to see The Mouse get taken down a peg.
But I think we need to be very clear; Disney did not miss out on anything because they were never going to take that sort of risk.
Disney was never going to release anything close to the Nimona we got. It would have been sanded down until anything obviously queer or controversial was as faint and unnoticeable as possible by the casual viewer. And then they would still be too scared of any potential backlash. So they would have given the film a limited release at theatres, with no advertising, or social media or support.
Like what happened with Strange World.
You remember Strange World, right?
No?
That's because no one does.
And I believe that was deliberate, because that way Disney can go "Weeellll... obviously we would LOVEto take more risks and have more inclusive stories but that's clearly not what the public wants!"
Look at the original concepts for Wish. The evil royal couple? The peter-panesque star boy that would have made the gen zers go feral the same way millenials went feral for Jack Frost? These could have been the best things about the movie, and even they were scrapped, and replaced with something more homogenised. And those ideas are nowhere near the level of the concepts and discussions Nimona brought to the table.
Disney can barely have explicit gay people. Nimona has a gay south Asian man in a relationship with an east Asian man. As a protagonist! But more than that, you think Disney could ever come up with a relationship as complicated and difficult as Boldheart and Goldenloin's? They would never have the guts to show one love interest cutting off the other's arm in a straight relationship. Let alone a gay one! And then for them to be on opposite sides of the conflict, shifting between feelings of betrayal, and questioning each other motives? That's some adult dark shit for a kids film.
Asha as a character was forced into the quirky girl role that Disney has already flogged to death with Anna and Rapunzel. You ever think they would allow a Disney princess to be as dark and violent and nuanced as Nimona? You ever picture the titial character of a Disney film AS the third act conflict, rampaging through a city in a self destructive rage? Nimona is anti authoritarian, vengeful, bloodthirsty, a pretty explicit trans allegory, and even, by the climax, openly suicidal. You KNOW that terrified Disney.
I had a thing about the Director here too but I was shocked by how long that got so I'll have to save her for a different post.
My point is the things that make Nimona art, that make Nimona a great story, that make the film important and Oscar worthy, are all things that Disney has become too chicken shit to produce. If Disney had released a film called Nimona it wouldn't have been Nimona. I fully believe that if the film hadn't had been 90% finished it wouldn't have been shelved. It would have been lobotomised and vivisected. Everything special and vital about the movie and its message would have been removed, and no one would have known what could have been. Once again we would have gotten scraps and been thankful for them.
It makes me think about films like Wish (and others we don't know the name of, and never will) and think of what they could have been if studio's like Disney were braver and let their artists make art, instead of content.
tl;dr Disney didn't miss out on Nimona because they are incapable of making Nimona. If they had produced it the real Nimona wouldn't exist. We didn't miss out on Nimona. And that's purely by luck.
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